Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  A pretty blonde girl, miniskirt and white stockings, butter-wouldn’t-melt mouth, corners me at the bar, says she’s got tickets to the Tyrannosaurus Rex gig at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, and next thing I know we’re riding the Northern Line en route. I’ve heard these pixies on the radio doing some fairy drivel titled, if you can believe it, “Ride a White Swan.” What the hell does that mean? Apparently they are comprised of some curly-haired, chubby-faced elf on acoustic and a tall, skinny drink of milk on congas. With that lineup my expectations are subterranean. But it’s just the miniskirt that’s got me in its sway.

  We arrive late and, Hello, hello? The joint is positively rocking. This is no knee-staring acoustic hippy duo; they’ve plugged in, cranked up the decibels, and shanghaied a bass player and drummer. Not sure what the conga player in the white suit is contributing to proceedings, but he’s got good hair and seems harmless enough. Anyway, it’s all about the little guy up front with the Jheri curls and elevator shoes. He plays a Les Paul, all crunching chords and lots of posing. He’s clomping around, sticking his lips out like an inflatable Jagger sex doll.

  Our seats are great but there is no sitting down—the atmosphere is sticky-hot and throbbing. The sound is fantastic, crunching out of Orange amps and stacks of WEM speakers. They end with something called “Hot Love” and it’s not bad, considering.

  Next morning the sweet little thing catches the train back to Sheffield and, touchingly, she has left me a little parting gift, something to remember her by. Something of which I am entirely and blissfully unaware.

  * * *

  I need an amp. Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, winding up from Leicester Square to Denmark Street, is Candy Cane Lane for a musician. Music shops are everywhere, brimming with instruments and gear I’ve only seen in films and magazines. Vox with its AC-30s, Super Beatles, Phantoms, and Marauders; Gibson Firebirds, Flying Vs, Explorers, Les Pauls, J-200s; Fender Strats and Precisions, Jazzmasters and Telecasters, and dozens more. Gretsch, Ludwig, Hofner, Premier, Zildjian, Martin, Shure, Marshall, Rickenbacker: names I can recite like a confessing Catholic while my eyes pop out of my skull like a snot-nosed Dickensian Christmas orphan as I stare in the windows and walk the aisles.

  Macari’s is my favorite shop, with its redolent-of-Beatles Vox sign beckoning. Come on in, it says, we’ve got that AC-30 you know you can’t live without. In I go, carrying my Mark VI into Aladdin’s cave. Musicians are everywhere, trying and buying, tuning and strumming, tightening snares, smacking tambourines, and twiddling with amps—a jumble of noise and music.

  Then a middle-aged guy in a blue checked shirt, with coiffed, white rockabilly hair comes over and introduces himself as the real Macari. His jaw must be in peak physical condition because the thing doesn’t cease clopping up and down for at least an hour. This guy can talk, and sell. He doesn’t stop talking.

  Next thing I know, my beautiful Vox Mark VI teardrop, with the custom jet-black paint job, the one I vowed to keep and cherish for the rest of my life, the one I worked 3,000 feet below the earth’s surface in a stinking, wet, dark, dank mine to be able to afford, is hanging on Macari’s wall and I am walking out the door with a beat-up, chipped, metallic-blue Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC-30.

  How did that happen?

  II

  For a musician, Thursday is the most important day of the week. At dawn on Thursdays, Fleet Street vans disgorge the bales of the music press, the rags that report and advertise and fuel the biz of music. These papers are stuffed with who’s doing what, who’s wearing what, who smells like money, who stinks of failure, who’s new, who’s old, who’s in a snit, who’s suing who, who’s number one, whose number’s up, who’s in, who’s out, who’s shaking it all about.

  And it’s all there in black and white under the splash red headlines. Every eagerly awaited Thursday the newspaper nests are festooned with the New Musical Express, Sounds, Record Mirror, Disk, and the rest. But the most read, revered, and necessary of all is the Melody Maker.

  It’s been around for donkeys’, dealing in jazz, big bands, and bebop, but since “Love Me Do” it has become more and more the tribune and mouthpiece of the pop and rock community. But, more than the gossip, the features, the rubbish tawdry tales of popdom, the Melody Maker is the conduit, the message board, the lonely hearts club. For the Melody Maker features that most essential element—the lifeblood of singers, guitarists, bass players, keyboardists, drummers, tuba players—in fact, any musician that makes a noise and wants a gig—in its back pages. It is the famous “Classifieds” section, and it is here that we all learn to turn every Thursday.

  I lie on my bed and scan the “Vocalists Wanted” column, trying to find an ad that just might fit my bill. Nothing ever screams out at me. None mention rock ’n’ roll, or at least none that don’t want the new Buddy Holly or the new Danny for the new “& the Juniors.” They just say “Rock,” with all the plodding, Cro-Magnon, drum-solo indulgence that word, in my mind, has come to entail. Nevertheless, I do stock up on 2p pieces and walk to the phone box in Redcliffe Square and make calls to a few circled ads that I, sort of, just maybe, if you squint your eyes, might fit.

  And get this straight. I’m no rookie, no dabbling dilettante. I’ve been singing in bands since I was thirteen. First band I was in was with sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. They seemed like grizzled pensioners to me. They smoked. They steamed up windows with chicks in the backseats of Chevy 427s. They shaved.

  “Night, Mum. Night, Dad.”

  “You off, son? Seems a bit early.”

  “Yeah, I’m tired. Got that history test tomorrow, too.”

  “Oh, of course. All right then. Sleep tight, love.”

  Into my bedroom, lock door, grab clothes, out the window. Back through the window at 1 a.m., conk out with $11 in my pocket.

  I’ve played high-school dances, community centers, roller-skating rinks, wedding receptions, TV talent shows, Christmas telethons, youth clubs. I’ve been there.

  Now I whip off on the buses or Tube, directions in hand, to all over London, to unfamiliar locales: Wapping, Tooting Broadway, Walthamstow, Mile End, Tufnell Park. To rehearsal studios, back rooms, cellars, pubs, factories, churches. And I audition.

  A dozen auditions. Then a dozen more. And so it goes. They don’t like me and I return the sentiment. This is going to be more difficult than I thought, bruising too. Every Thursday, same as thousands of other musicians across Britain, I lie on my bed with a pen scanning the ads in the Melody Maker.

  I hear the other tenants as they pass my door, heading to the communal loo. The most we’ve all shared is a glance and a nod. They seem to be an English woman of indeterminate vintage, a Dutch woman, early twenties, and an English man, possibly a student, wispy attempt at a beard, National Health specs. On my social stepladder students are perched on the rung one down from hippies.

  Sitting at the small wooden table, I look out at the relentless Wednesday rain. On the other side of Ifield Road, two floors down, an attractive lady sits at a dressing table near the window brushing her shoulder-length hair. She is starkers.

  III

  The grand is gone. A thousand bucks. Where did it go? Clothes and clubs and Strats and all sorts. But it is undeniably gone, with the exception of a lone tenner.

  I have to get a job, there’s no alternative. So I brush all my teeth and drag my zero qualifications down to the Labour Exchange, where a kindly, bored woman gives me forms to fill out and suggests three employment opportunities. The first two make my eyes glaze over but the third seems worth a shot. Moss Bros, famous apparently though I know not of it, needs a chap to work in the department of formal rentals. Off I go to Covent Garden, and upon arrival at Moss Bros I am put in a lift, sent down into the bowels of the building, and placed under the tutelage of one Goolam Assenge, pronounced Goolam Assenge.

  According to Goolam, this is the job. Gentlemen come into Moss Bros to h
ire formal attire—morning coats, gloves, toppers, and such. The attending salesman ascertains the customer’s requirements, bends slightly at the waist, backs obsequiously away, then turns and sprints down to the lower floor where there are row upon row of shelves and hangers containing all the garments in all the sizes. He grabs three or four pairs of trousers that he feels are within his customer’s general size range, and hares off up the stairs with them. Fifteen or so minutes later he clatters back down, throws the trousers in a heap in the corner, grabs four top hats, and tears off back up the stairs again. My job, explains Goolam, is to pick up the garments, fold them neatly, and put them back where they came from.

  Now, multiply that salesman by ten, multiply that customer by a hundred, add the fact that this is the racing season, consider that a percentage of the salesmen are psychotics, factor in the piles of rental returns, and you’ll still not come remotely close to comprehending the volume, the madness, the bitchiness, the chaos, the stacks and never-ending stacks of pin-striped toff-wear I have to deal with in my new position. I will work from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, half day on Saturday, for the princely sum of £11.50 a week. I am to start the next morning.

  On the way home I decide to stock my larder, or at least the narrow shelf above my cooker, and attempt to wring as much as possible out of my lone remaining £10 note. From a small shop where the proprietor is the spitting image of Gandhi’s more emaciated brother, I buy a loaf of bread, a small box of tea bags, a tiny white jar of fish paste, a plastic container of chocolate spread, two tins of spaghetti, and a bottle of milk. At home I heat up one of the tins of spaghetti, and for dessert I eat three chocolate-spread sandwiches. I nod off reading H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World.

  Next morning, shilling in the meter followed by a tepid, shallow bath, and I’m off. By about the tenth minute my new job starts to drive me nuts. By the end of the day I want to murder the salesmen in creatively brutish ways. They treat me as though I do not exist. As far as they are concerned, the piles of clothes they throw on the floor get put back neatly and in an organized fashion by magic.

  Goolam is at the cleaning end of the Moss Bros equation: dry cleaning, repairs, ironing, nothing fazes him. He is the voice of cheerful, calm reason. He laughs, he smiles, he sings ditties. He tells tales about the salesmen. Goolam does go on a bit but he gets me through my first few days, then a week, then ten days.

  With my £11.50 I must pay for twelve Tube journeys, to and from Moss Bros, per week. Home sweet bedsit costs £6.50 per week. Even seven baths a week costs seven shillings.

  I begin to go hungry at about the same time as my crotch begins to itch.

  * * *

  More Thursday trips to the red phone box in Redcliffe Square, more auditions, more failures—some abject and embarrassing. Most of these bands are bluesy combos, with big perms or auburn Afros, playing “Rock Me Baby” till my marrow aches. The big, harsh, scratchy, ersatz Delta vocal they want is just not my forte. Other bands flaunt their delusions of prog grandeur. Sweeping arrangements, ludicrous lyrics, excruciating non-melodies that I’m expected to grasp in five minutes. I keep reminding myself, Groucho Marx fashion, that if I got one of these gigs I wouldn’t want it anyway. But there’s no escaping the fact that these auditions hurt and gnaw at the confidence.

  The routine at Moss Bros, Goolam notwithstanding, is grinding me down too. The job never gets done, not even for five minutes. All those hours of picking up clothes, folding them, putting them neatly away . . . same clothes, same shelves, ad infinitum.

  At home of an evening I’m nearly out of food. Just two stale heels of bread and some chocolate spread remain on my shelf. I try to convince myself that stale bread is just white toast. In my Redcliffe phone box, spending a precious 2p calling for yet another audition, someone has left behind a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. I give it a go later at home. It’s hardly a page-turner.

  And what’s with this itch? I remind myself of a straw-chewing yokel the way I’m constantly scratching at my nethers. At work I’ve started ducking into nooks or the loo to claw away at my groin like an ape. On the Piccadilly Line I hang on to the hand strap and cross my legs, my eyes watering, fighting the impulse to grope myself in public. What’s going on? I’m the most fastidiously clean guy in town.

  Then, one night in the bathtub, driven to utter distraction by the discomfort, I am aghast to spy a gruesome little black critter ridin’ the range on my nuts. Hey, what do I mean “a”? This is a full-on invasion. They look like scuttling seabed crustaceans and there appear to be dozens of them.

  Gradually, my mind obviously dulled from lack of nourishment, I grasp the disgusting reality and am repulsed beyond belief. Christ, I’ve had fifty baths since that Tyrannosaurus Rex night. Wouldn’t the little bastards drown? I spray my most cherished accoutrements with shaving cream, grab my Gillette razor, and one minute later my bits look like a plucked chicken in a Chinatown window on a chilly day. On the windowsill I spy a nailbrush left by some former tenant, bristles bent into twisted little J shapes. I apply it to the offending area with vigor, to the point of pain. I’ve never actually scrubbed my balls before and I won’t be recommending it anytime soon. God, this is awful. I dry off and inspect myself with a mirror held at mostly unattractive angles.

  In bed later I am so revolted that I lie awake all night cursing Sheffield and fiddling with my new lower-tonsorial arrangement. Saturday dawns and there’s no denying it: I still itch.

  * * *

  12:01: I’m out the door of Moss Bros and into the nearest library. The librarian offers assistance but I demur. She persists helpfully. I demur emphatically. It takes me just under an hour and I blush every time my research leads me to another book that I furtively pull from the shelves, but finally I have my answer. That answer is, apparently, something called Dettol.

  Out the library door, avoiding eye contact, I scour the streets until I locate the nearest chemist. Dettol is cheap, mercifully, so, flushed of cheek, I purchase a big bottle and attempt to saunter suavely out of the shop the way I imagine Jean-Paul Belmondo would in similar circumstances.

  Back to Finborough Road. In the bathroom I strip and glance at the label: isopropanol, pine oil, chloroxylenol, castor oil, other ingredients I’m too impatient to read. I climb in the tub, take the top off the bottle, upend it, and splash the contents liberally all over my infested formerly erogenous zone. One second later I am leaping out of the tub and bouncing around on tiptoes, legs spread as wide as I can get them, cupping my balls and screaming, “Aaahhh, aaahh, ahhhh!” interspersed with curses of the “oh fucking god” variety. There is a knock at the door. With Herculean effort I stop jumping and manage to momentarily stifle the yelping.

  “Yes?” I respond. Too high a pitch, too frightened; get a grip. Got one, as it happens.

  “Is everything all right?” It is the Dutch girl from down the hall. We haven’t even been introduced.

  “Yes. Yes, everything’s fine.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Am I certain? No, I’m not fucking certain, truth be told, which it won’t be, not now, not ever. “Yes, yes. Fine, thank you. I . . . ah . . . scalded my . . . toe. Hot water.”

  “Your toe?”

  Go away, woman.

  “Yes, my bloody toe. But it’s fine now. Thank you.”

  “You are welcome. Would you like bandage? I have it.”

  “What? Bandage? Why would I . . . no, thank you very much.”

  “But your toe is bloody.”

  “My toe is not bloody. I just . . . just stubbed it, that’s all. No, scalded it. Thank you, though.”

  “You are welcome.”

  I pause and listen, my groin on fire. All quiet on the Dutch front. She must be gone, surely. Seconds pass with nary a floorboard squeak. I need to be sure.

  “Good-bye,” I say.

  “Good-bye,” she repli
es cheerily, and I hear her footsteps go down the hall, her door closing.

  Back to the inferno. I climb into the empty tub, lie down, and wriggle like an upside-down lobster toward the tap end. Draping my legs over the edge of the tub and arching my pelvis upward, I maneuver my sizzling, frying balls to just underneath the tap and turn on the cold water full blast.

  “AAAAIIIEEEEE!”

  The cold water is not the blissful relief I had envisioned; in fact it has created some sort of chemical reaction that is not only beyond pain, at least as I have previously experienced it, but has also left my most prized apparatus steaming and, as I see in the mirror while leaping out of the tub, a ghastly puce color. I am further dismayed to note that my penis, in shock no doubt at the unprecedented torture, has shrunk to embarrassingly minuscule proportions. Is there no end to this ignominy? Of course there isn’t. I lie on the floor, fetal and whimpering, waiting for the knock. It arrives on schedule, with a Dutch accent.

  “Hello? Hello? Is everything okay? Hello?”

  “Hello,” I answer in a voice I do not recognize, twisting my neck to try to make it sound as though it’s not coming from the floor. “Yes, it’s just . . . just . . . the water was too hot. Everything is fine. Please go away.”

  “Are you certain? You screamed so oddly, like a girl. I was worried.”

  Like a girl, she said. I am lying on the floor, nude, clutching my terrified, shriveled dong, having unadvisedly doused my pestilence-ridden undercarriage with napalm, and a strange woman outside the bathroom door is telling me I screamed like a girl. Is this the absolute nadir of my existence? God, I hope so. I do know that I’ve rather had it with the nosy Netherlands Florence bloody Nightingale.

  “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Am I certain, again? This defies belief. Where did she learn that phrase? And why? So she could say to some passing guy, “Please, which way to the train station?” And the guy tells her and she replies, “Are you certain?” She could get a punch in the nose with that carry-on. Get a refund on your Fodor’s, lady. You’re wasting your guilders at Berlitz.